AuDHD Teen Parenting: Surviving Puberty and Perimenopause
In This Article
- A Quiet Storm
- Our Brains and Bodies
- The Rituals That Connect Us
- Puberty, Perimenopause, and ADHD: Next Steps
There are days when my daughter walks through the front door, drops her bag wherever it lands, and before either of us says a word, I know it’s going to be one of those evenings. She doesn’t always know why she’s overwhelmed. Honestly, some days, neither do I.
She is 12 now. Last year, puberty showed up and brought all its mess with it: the big emotions, the overwhelm, the anxiety, the contradictions that seem to appear overnight. By then, I was already well into my own hormonal transition.
Perimenopause had brought its own collection of restless nights, brain fog, aching joints, changing moods, and the strange feeling that my body no longer recognized the rules it had followed for decades.
My daughter is becoming a woman. I’m becoming a different one.
A Quiet Storm
“Double hormone storm” is how I’ve seen this dynamic described. With more women having children later, a lot of mothers are going through perimenopause just as their daughters hit puberty. Understanding this felt oddly comforting. It didn’t fix anything, but it told me I hadn’t been imagining how hard this stretch of life can be.
[Take This Test: Is It Perimenopause or ADHD?]
Except almost everything I read assumed there were two adults splitting the weight of it. That’s not my house. I’m doing this alone. When we’ve both run out of patience for the day, there’s no one else to hand it off to. If my daughter needs comfort, she comes to me. If I’ve had another broken night’s sleep and feel like I’m running on fumes, I still have to be the calm one. Some days I manage that. Plenty of days I don’t.
Our Brains and Bodies
There’s another layer to our story. My daughter is neurodivergent — AuDHD. For her, puberty is layered atop a nervous system that already processes the world differently. So when I began to learn about how the menstrual cycle affects ADHD symptoms, I thought: How many evenings had I read wrong? How many hard nights had I understood as simply being about parenting or behavior, when hormonal changes might also have been playing a part?
It made me think about myself, too. Women are finally talking more openly about how fluctuating hormones during perimenopause can affect focus, mood and our ability to cope. Learning this made me look at some of my own difficult days differently, too. We assumed we weren’t trying hard enough. Turns out we might have been carrying a lot more than anyone gave us credit for.
None of this pauses life, though. There are still lunches to pack, laundry piling up, homework to check over her shoulder, bills that don’t care how tired you are, e-mails waiting, work that needs doing, and somewhere underneath all of it, two people trying to make sense of feelings neither of us asked for.
[Read: Let’s Talk About Perimenopause and ADHD]
The Rituals That Connect Us
Dinner has always been our time. We talk about our days, laugh about little things, and I try to be fully present, with my phone nowhere near the table. Sometimes she can’t wait to tell me about the latest adventures of her favorite book character.
Other evenings, words aren’t enough, and what she really needs is to release all the energy she’s been holding in. Then, without much warning, the mood can shift. I might ask her to have a shower before bedtime, while she’s already imagining something completely different, and suddenly we’re standing on opposite sides of an argument neither of us was expecting. Those are the nights I try to remember: connection matters more than getting it perfect.
We’ve built our own small rituals along the way. Long walks, because talking is easier when you don’t have to look at each other. Hot chocolate on rough days. Journals or drawings that say the things our mouths won’t. A dumb joke that somehow cuts through all the tension in the room. And, maybe most of all, letting each other start over after a bad day.
I never like going to bed with things left unresolved between us. Life is uncertain, and tomorrow is never guaranteed. If we’ve had a difficult evening, I try to make sure we’ve found our way back to each other before we fall asleep. Even if we’ve both been tired, overwhelmed or misunderstood, I don’t want the last thing we carry into sleep to be anger. I’d rather it be a cuddle, a smile, an “I love you,” or the quiet certainty that, whatever today looked like, tomorrow we begin again.
I’m not writing this because I’ve cracked the code on raising a daughter through puberty while going through perimenopause myself. I haven’t. Most days I’m just doing the best I can with the woman I am today, hoping I’m becoming the mother I want to be tomorrow. But if another mother is reading this after a sleepless night, or an evening that felt heavier than it had any right to be, I want her to know she isn’t failing. She might simply be standing in the middle of two enormous transitions at once.
My daughter is learning how to inhabit the woman she is becoming. And, unexpectedly, so am I. Because becoming a woman, I’m starting to understand, isn’t something that happens once during puberty. Maybe, in different ways, we keep becoming her throughout our lives.
Puberty, Perimenopause, and ADHD: Next Steps
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